My name is John. I purchased a PCjr (well my parents did) in 1985 at ComputerCraft.

Later on, I got on the PCE mailing list and ordered the 512k upgrade, which was of course quite pricey at the time. Fast forward to now, and PCE is long gone (along with my original junior). I see a lot of references to PCE and all the neat add-ons BUT I hardly ever see any PCE products for sale on the auction sites or anyplace else?

How does one locate PCE stuff? Mostly Racore, and of course Tecmar and IBM branded stuff is out there and comes available from time to time, but I hardly see any PCE stuff or even the MS Booster sidecar for sale.

I don't think you are looking in the wrong places. PCE stuff is just that rare.

In the late 80s it was a niche market, and it was expensive. Most PCjr owners would have upgraded to an XT or AT clone instead of trying to stretch a five year old PC clone that had some notorious short comings.

In the last ten years I've seen one of their SCSI sidecars come up for auction and a jrExcellerator. The jrExcellerator was hidden in a system which had a "mystery" switch on the front - I took a gamble and it paid off. (It helps offset all of the times I rescue machines just to keep them out of the dump, like yesterday's 90 mile drive for a basic 256K machine.) Some other oddball parts might be showing up once in a while, but it's pretty thin.

The Racore expansion units probably hit a sweet spot - a second floppy drive, 512K of memory, and a printer port was a perfect next step for a PCjr owner.

The MS Boosters are rare because they were an early product, and MS probably pulled the plug after the initial sales figures for the machine started to disappoint. Which is a shame because the memory, clock, and mouse was another good combination and those were easily upgraded to 512KB. They were also throwing in a copy of the flight simulator at the time which was a good show case for the machine (640x200 in 4 colors), so it was a relative steal even when it was new.

PCE parts are fairly rare in my experience as well. Over the past 8 years, I've acquired one of almost everything that PCE made for the PCjr from Ebay auctions . . . but all of that is from only 3 auctions! I've only seen one PCE SCSI card listed on Ebay (the one I bought). I picked up both VGA and Sound sidecars in another auction (part of a complete system). Early on, I discovered a jrExcellerator (with the wrong speed-grade processor installed -- easily fixed) all by itself and with full docs.

I'm sure that some PCE products do go by unnoticed from time to time, hidden inside a system. It's not always easy to spot.